Hi John,
But would you think the same if you lived in New Zealand - or Canada - or
Vietnam?
I enjoy OOoCons very much, meeting old friends, and making new ones. I
don't know how effective they are for attracting new community members. A
team needs to be already well established and successful to make a
successful bid for an OOoCon. We have never held an OOoCon in North
America, where our presence is comparatively weak.
I don't know whether a virtual OOoCon would be more successful in building
the community. It would certainly cause less damage to the planet.
I think this is a valuable discussion, and would encourage others to join in!
I really see the problems, and I know that "we Europeans" are in a quite
comfortable situation, and others have it much harder to join us.
We can work on this, we can improve the situation -- either by getting
more funding, or by better integrating a virtual element into our
conferences: thinking of live streams, participation via Skype or IRC,
and such.
However, I think it does help no one if we cancel our "real life
conferences". Folks from New Zealand, Canada or Vietnam won't meet
people face to face nontheless, and the others would lose a great
ability to meet with friends and community.
I also do know that it cost a lot of effort -- time, money -- to run an
OOoCon, and we can also see if we can improve things on this end.
However, I'm still not convinced at all that cancelling OOoCon or moving
it to a two-year rhythm helps anyone. I doubt many people would attend a
virtual conference at all, and we'd lose a great way of communication.
Again, we can enhance the current "real life" conferences with some more
virtual elements, or have a separate virtual OOoCon (I favor the first
variant), but I'm against having a two-year scheme.
Florian
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